The present invention generally relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and an information transmitting medium and, more particularly, to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and an information transmitting medium that are adapted to receive information from an information provider by use of personal information existing on a network with a relatively simple terminal device from any desired location.
With the recent popularization of the Internet, various pieces of information have come to be available. These pieces of information include the provision of a product purchase service and other various services.
For example, when accessing a predetermined service or information provider through the Internet to purchase a predetermined product through the home page of that service or information provider, a user must input personal information such as his or her name, age, address, telephone number, and credit card number to submit these pieces of information to the provider. When accessing two or more service or information providers to acquire plural products, the user must submit his or her personal information to each of these providers every time he or she places an order. Usually, the personal information to be submitted to these providers is substantially the same in content. Therefore, the user needs to input the same information repeatedly, a time-wasting and error-prone operation.
To overcome this inconvenience, OPS (Open Profiling Standard), for example, provides on the user's personal computer, as application programs, a user profile recorded with the user's personal information and a user agent for providing this user profile to service or information providers on behalf of the user as required. This system therefore frees the user from inputting the same personal information every time he or she accesses service or information providers.
However, in this approach, each user must prepare the user agent as the application program on his or her own. Consequently, if a revision is made in a communication protocol or format used, the user must update the application program accordingly, thereby presenting a problem of increased user load.
In addition, a mobile terminal device for accessing information or service providers from outside the home is generally designed with emphasis placed on mobility and low cost and therefore is inferior in capability to a desktop computer. This often presents a problem of disabling the user to make access from the mobile terminal device to information or service providers in the same communication environment in which the access is made from the desktop computer.
This problem may be solved by providing a rewritable memory device to add or extend capabilities but at the cost of complicated device constitution.